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Author: Monty Munford

'Monty Munford is a Strategic Consultant with more than 15 years’ experience in mobile, digital media, web and journalism. He has a fat contact book and works with global clients that include companies as diverse as Paramount Digital Entertainment, Wapple. Crunch and Liverpool FC.

'He returned to the UK in September 2010 after living in India for two years, speaks regularly at industry events and writes on the mobile industry for publications such as TechCrunch, The Huffington Post and The Guardian.

He also writes a weekly column on mobile/social media/technology for The Telegraph and in his other life he also appeared with speaking parts in two big-budget Bollywood movies that were released in 2011.

There used to be an unspoken rule about the Christmas retail season that any ads would only begin after Bonfire Night was over. After that, the deluge began.

Unusually for today’s society, this particular season is getting longer not shorter, as advertisers and retailers inculcate in consumers the idea that Halloween is now the time when the floodwaters are unleashed.

Christmas now begins on November 1st, Hark the Herald Angels Sing! But for online retailers it comes even earlier because of the seasonal gravity of that time of year.

A bad Christmas in the age of algorithms and customer acquisition extends beyond revenues and margins; it probably spells the end.

Recent research from Ometria bears this out on data it accumulated from comparing last year’s Christmas with the first ten months of this year.

Behind Lenin's Tomb in Moscow there is a small door embedded in the Kremlin Wall where Soviet rulers used to duck through on their way to presiding over the annual May Day Parade.

The door is small and, according to a Russian soldier I met there a decade ago, it was deliberately so because of Stalin's diminutive stature.

After all, if he was about to acknowledge the size of his huge army, the last thing he needed was to be reminded of was his lack of height.

Rather like Stalin's door, the, er, window of opportunity for Russian entrepreneurs has been similarly narrow. Inventors and creators were employed by the State and any resulting IP or patents would be owned by the State.